[For the full on-line text of this interview, too large for e-mail, see Mike Richter's site, at http://www.mrichter.com/opera/welcome.htm Remaining dates for "Ariadne" in the War Memorial are at 8 p.m., Saturday, 9/21, Thursday, 9/26, and a 2 p.m. matinee on Sunday, 9/29.] "When you get older," says Laura Claycomb, "you don't mind making a fool of yourself. I'm willing to take a risk, and that made a difference." That difference is between the young soprano's shaded, brilliant, acclaimed role debut as Zerbinetta last week and the time when she fell in love with the role. Measured in years, the difference is more than a decade between her appearance now in the San Francisco Opera's new production of Richard Strauss' "Ariadne auf Naxos" and the time Claycomb studied and trained as an Adler Fellow with the SF Opera Center. It was even before then, in her first year with the Merola Program, that I first heard her singing, and found that she has "an excellent high soprano, but alarmingly poor diction and insufficient stage experience," along with a buoyant personality, as shown in her happily chatting away on stage while waiting for her turn. Since then, the high notes got higher and more solid, diction improved, stage experience developed exponentially, but she is still a nattering nabob, a mother lode of operatic story-telling... [Continued on http://www.mrichter.com/opera/welcome.htm] Janos Gereben/SF [log in to unmask]